Are we all living in the past?

If you've read a few of these things you've probably noticed a theme of my aversion for empiricism. Empiricism, if you've never heard of it, says all we can know basically boils down to what can be experienced through our five senses. There are some great debates out there on this theme between empiricists and non-empiricists. I'm not going to get into the mechanisms of knowing and enter that battlefield. Instead, I'm going to bring up a simple point about consciousness and our physical experiences that seems rather interesting in the light of empiricist thought.

Anything with mass is bound by the space-time continuum. The greater the mass, the greater the strength of this binding. Now, if we accept the empiricist approach to human experience that knowledge is based on physical senses and sensory data are based on matter, it would make sense that neural activity can be seen as a founding element in knowing. But, since all matter is bound by mass and the distortions of space-time relative to that mass, the transmission of energy from the object being sensed and the consciouness perceiving that sensation requires time itself. Seeing as the sensation and the perception of this sensation are not in fact occuring at the same moment, there is no direct correlation between what is known, by empiricist standards, and what is perceived.

The implication here is that, according to the rules of empiricist thought, we are actually living in the past. There is a gap in time between what happens and when we perceive it. This is a major flaw of this approach to perception and a valid reason for dismissing this approach to knowledge and consciousness as being flawed.

John Paul Jackson outlines 7 dimensions and time is one of them. By realizing that other dimensions, such as Spirit, which is timeless, can give us more accurate information about what is actually happening than our senses because there is no delay between the act and the perception, we can begin to realize relying on sense, though normally provable by common physical connection, doesn't necessarily possess the most power as a source of understanding.